It's hard to justify that when you see how many people are completely oblivious to displays with a horrendous blue shift. Sure if you go back and forth between the calibrated and non-calibrated settings they'll be able to tell the difference, but otherwise...Reply

Anand told an entertaining anecdote about letting a friend borrow his iPad recently. When the friend fired up Netflix, he stated, "I've never seen that color red before!" Now, when he looks at any device, he loads up Netflix and says, "That's not red." Note that this friend is not an Apple user, but he has now been converted to pre-calibration.

Incidentally, I've heard the BoM cost of pre-calibration is somewhere around $5, which is really high when you're looking at things from the penny-pinching perspective that the race to the bottom has created. On the other hand, if you're spending $20 more for 2880x1620 (or possibly even more than that), $5 extra is nothing.

Word to the wise (OEMs): If you send us a great display that's not pre-calibrated, we're going to ding you in the reviews. I did as much with the Acer Aspire S7, I'll do it in the Dell XPS 12 Duo, and I'll continue to do it until companies get with the times.Reply

Proper pre-calibration *reduces* sales. People equate bluish shades with "new" and "shiny", and when they look at displays on the showroom, they provably almost always consider the bluest one to be the best. That's why all displays are so horribly miscalibrated, it's sort of an arms race to make your colors look shittier.

The same is true in audio -- when the average person is asked to evaluate audio quality, and in some cases even music quality, 90% of what they score by is simply volume.Reply

OTOH from PCW: "Acer noted that it was looking to bring non-touch ultra-high-resolution LCD monitors to the market later in 2013. "

If you're marketing that sort of highend model display why wouldn't you include the touch layer checkbox too? Any mid/high end monitor these days has a USB hub so you've already got the connectivity. Also AFAIK this is high enough resolution that you'd need to use DP which has a 720mbit AUX channel, would carrying the USB2 connection over that be possible?Reply

Higher gamut does not mean that it is better. They are actually very inaccurate and not appropriate for work out of the box. Wide gamut displays are often oversaturated and not calibrated to proper sRGB. They can be properly calibrated of course, but there's a good reason why they are so derided on pro forums.

Outside of NEC (the best), Apple, and the most expensive Dell displays, there are very few options out there suitable for color work.Reply

Even if I never buy a Retina Macbook Pro I will still be grateful for their existence: it might just be what's getting everyone off their arses about the frankly embarrassing pixel densities in current laptops.Reply

Color is the thing that I'm even more excited by. It looks spectacular and there's much less need to plug into an external IPS display when doing color correction in the field. Until then the best displays you'd have in the field are color calibrated LCDs or (seriously) an iPad.Reply

Pointless as Windows grants you complete access to the resolution and the scaling. It's going to be a tough road ahead for every dev to optimize the gazillion of Windows programs to something they should've adhered from the start; and that is scaling guidelines. Where Apple forces a double on everything as to avoid non-integer scaling(and still depends on the devs to repatch), Windows allows you to pick any size between 100% and 200%, yes that includes 137% or 184%.

Case in point: Mozilla optimized Firefox for rMBP; but did not optimized it for the 200%, or the same setting, on the Windows front.https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=82067...Notice that Mozilla has built in 1.25 and 1.5 scaling where idealistically they should make Firefox independent of the scaling scale in Windows.Reply

Oh yea, these panels are going to be a huge headache for a good chunk of users.

Windows DPI scaling isn't going to be "fixed" unless Windows dumps legacy altogether and alters their approach to Metro. I've personally tried out my productivity software on the 1080p Zenbook when contemplating a purchase and quickly found it to be absolutely abysmal as far as text and scaling were concerned. The idea of getting a great display with lots of pixels to play with quickly took a backseat to "Oh god, please just let it work." As much as I'd love to see the move away from the default crappy 1366x768 panels, I'm also well aware of the troubles the await.

I'm not even sure MS can get it right with Metro given that their Win8 scaling hasn't improved at all. In fact, IE Metro still can't scale properly and issues come up when browsing certain sites. If they can't even get their own software to work properly then there's no hope that the rest are going to follow suit. Reply

I don't care about films either, but 16:9 gives you the option to include a numpad on your 15" Notebook. With 4:3 screens, you needed at least 17" screens to get enough keyboard real estate.

As far as work goes, luckily most modern software allows you to move all your menus/ribbons from the top to the side of the window, leaving you with a more square working area. Due to this, I am no longer as unhappy about 16:10 or 16:9 screens for work as I used to be when they first started showing up.Reply

I've seen Windows DPI scaling break a few applications, I like to leave it at 100%. With that, things on my 1920x1080 15 inch laptop display are to a point where they are just big enough. With a resolution this large, you'd have to go to one of the scaled settings (125% or 150%) to be comfortable, which may lead to some incompatibilities. How are they going to deal with this? On the Macbooks they just used pixel doubling since it was an exact doubling of resolution in each dimension, but with Windows there are multiple resolutions to support. How will this work? Reply

I admit I don't understand why all these ultra-awesome displays are only heading into laptops??It's not like you can stick 4x GTX680's in a 15" notebook, or a pair of K20 Tesla compute cards, or whatever...

Seriously... ~215ppi for what?

Why not make the same display, only offer it in ~24-27" monitors. Give us the 138-122ppi, make it IPS (AH-IPS), and make it affordable...

What doesn't make sense to me is why the GPU companies are not more heavily influencing panel production... It would be in their best interest to make displays that are hard to push, then they can come out with their "GeForce Titan" cards and give us the solution. They get money, we get happy.Reply